Many Indian hospitals were scrambling for beds and oxygen as COVID-19 infections surged to a new daily record on Thursday, with the second wave of infections centered on the rich western state of Maharashtra.
Experts blamed everything from official complacency to aggressive variants. The government blamed a widespread failure to practice physical distancing and wear face masks.
“The situation is horrible,” said Avinash Gawande, an official at a government hospital in the industrial city of Nagpur that was battling a flood of patients, as
India has added 200,739 infections over the last 24 hours, health ministry data showed, for a seventh daily record surge in the last eight days, while 1,038 deaths took its toll to 173,123.
Its tally of 14.1 million infections is second only to the United States, with 31.4 million.
Despite injecting about 114 million vaccine doses, the highest figure worldwide after the United States and China, India has covered only a small part of its 1.4 billion people.
India said on Thursday regulators would decide on emergency-use applications for foreign COVID-19 vaccines within three working days, as it tries to attract Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna to sell their shots.
